It was worth reminding himself, he decided, that whole worlds could die. No different from people. People who died left bones. Worlds left ruins.

He had saved a girl at that estate, a girl he had loved, but she was gone now. Returned, he supposed, to her family, but as that family was not from round here no one knew who they were, or even where they lived. His ma wouldn’t tell him anything about any of that. It was just a truth he had to live with, an unhappy one like all the other unhappy ones: Jinia was gone.

There were lots of burned places now. Black ruins on the skyline on all sides of Abara Delack. Looted farmhouses made blackened smears across the fields. He couldn’t see much of the monastery from where he lived with his mother, and yet, above all the others, it drew his eye the most: a distant hill toothed by a ragged black wall. He was curious about it. He wondered if he would feel the same about it as he did about the Great House, as a place deserving at least one visit.

Ma wanted him close by these days. She wanted him going nowhere out of her sight. But he was eleven now. And he looked even older, especially with the burn scars. And this morning, when at last he slipped out from her grasp, and set off down the track that led to the road that led through the town and then back up again on the other side, to the old monastery, she had wailed behind him, reaching out with her hands as if to drag him back.

Her tears made him feel bad, and he vowed to fix everything when he returned home. The soldiers were finally gone from Abara Delack. They had marched east, into the forest that had been burned down first, to make the going easier. But people were hungry in the town. They were leaving because there was not enough food there. When they left, pulling carts, they took with them whatever the soldiers hadn’t stolen from them. Wreneck had seen them on the road, all going somewhere else, but it seemed no one could decide where that was, as the families went off in different directions from each other. And every now and then one of them came back, only to leave again a few days later, heading out another way.

So the town Wreneck walked into was almost empty of people, and those who remained were mostly staying in their houses. The livery had burned down, he saw. So had the land office. A few men and women stood outside the tavern, not doing much or saying anything, and they watched Wreneck walk past.

Pausing, he looked into the narrow alley beside the tavern, thinking to see the one-armed man who had been Orfantal’s mother’s secret friend, since the alley was where the man lived. But he wasn’t at his usual place on the steps to the cellar. Then he caught a faint motion deeper in the alley’s shadows, something small and huddled, trying to keep warm beneath a thin blanket.